I really miss the good old days (stability)

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[original flipper]

HI

Don't sweat - anyone spending £3,000+ has got no one to blame but themselves if they end up with the wrong good's.

I will be happy enough when my DAW finally arrives.

Flipper.

[TVD]

The year was 1997.

I had a state of the art PII 300 with 128mb of ram.
two 5400 rpm scsi hdd.
Logic audio v3.
Windows 95
TONS of outboard gear...

i made music maybe 12 hours a day. that's all I did. the only problem i ever had was once when playback would stop in my song... logic didn't have a cpu meter then, no one could understand why I had this problem because i had "such a powerful machine"..the answer was simple...i had too many logic 3 reverbs running and my cpu was crapping out
Did my machine EVER crash? i swear to you, it never did in an entire year, not one single crash. ever. and all my harware gear was rock solid.

Then the vsti came. Logic 4, which attempted to host them. the worst version of logic ever made. i got greedy. i wanted to start doing everything within the machine. i was sick of bouncing to dat then sending into wavelab 2 via digital cable for mastering.

Now, years later and I have 100's upon 100's of vsti plugins, a reasonably state of the art machine, a super fast internet connection, and Cubase SX2.
I can't get through the day without having a serious crash or poof. and you know when it happens? ONLY with third party plugins. If i never used any of these, and stuck to cubase just as a midi and audio host and used all my outboard gear, I suspect, I would also never have a crash. I also suspect, that those who find their host to be rock solid, do not use such a huge variety of plugs as I do.

There are too many variables. one coder might succesfully test his/her plugin with a number of hosts, but will never be able to predict what problems interaction with other plugins in the same project might bring. I don't think we will ever have 100% stability within the vst (and other plugin formats) world.

What we do have is amazing convenience, never having to send sysex dumps to our outboard gear to load the correct pactehs per song, never having to turn on more than one box, having the best total recall per project and automation we could only previously dream of. And no cable clutter!
I so just want to find a middle point between the two. because to be honest, as much as i love the sounds i have and the convenience, the frustration of instability is slowly driving me insane. And I don't know what to do about it.

You can throw away your pride and become a full-time FLS & Live-user.

Now seriously, cut back on most of the VST effects. Go back to your roots of "less is more".

Just use what Cubase SX has already given you and make it work. Beside, it not like you're making over-produced songs for another teen diva or anything.

[WilliamK]

My Notebook also freezes for no reason, never found the problem. My Desktop, when it first came out, was giving the blue-screen-of-death all the time. I down-clocked it a bit, not is rock-solid for weeks and weeks before I reboot. And usualy, I only do for software updates.

Don't tell others I said, but Windows-XP ROCKS!

Wk

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[no_barcode]

The problem is not *just* the 3rd party developers. You have to consider where the SDK they use comes from. Steinberg is not known for its rock-solid and stable sequencing platform. Is it so far-fetched to think that their VST/i standard isn't just as shoddy?

I feel your pain man. Random audio-glitches, stuttering, drop-outs, instrument crashes, host crashes, PC reboots... I want my K2600S back.

On the other hand I just bought z3ta+ during the group buy deal. A synth with that sound and those features in the hardware world would have been priced in the thousands, even today. I couldn't say enough good things about GMedia's stuff (not that they're bug-free or anything... but the sound, my God, the sound!)

It's a catch 22 I guess. Save often and report bugs to the devs?

I dunno.

[cron]

Maybe I should have read the whole thread before posting, but Fast Tracker 2 was just as fond of crashing to desktop (or DOS screen) in 1996 as todays apps.

[machinesworking]

i did read your entire post, but want to specifically clarify something here. Logic on mac was as unstable as all f**k with tons of third party plugs.

See that's odd to me? L7 has a few problems right now, random crashes on different hardware configurations, but earlier versions were all pretty stable for me. L7 is the only version of Logic I've had be unstable at the software level, where it's a matter of waiting for an update, I've used though.

I switched to logic at 4.7.3 and never had any major issues with Logic until now. So to be fair, L7 is still a .0.0 release, when the update appears we'll see if it's still the case?

Sometimes it's something that you wouldn't expect you know?
At one point I had "systen overload" messages from Logic 5-6 when it was only using maybe 30% CPU? I found out that MOTU and Emagic had both decided to instal MIDI drivers in my system extensions. Once they were removed, everything returned to normal.

What I'm curious about is are you experiencing the same problems with VST on Logic PC?

[ouroboros]

win 98 - heavily edited
FL5
too many vst's to use.
Rock stable.

homest! I only run into trouble when I overtax my cpu, iow: if everything grinds to a complete halt, it generally stays that way.

[Sascha Franck]

What I'm curious about is are you experiencing the same problems with VST on Logic PC?

Apart from certain incompatibility issues regarding some plugins (mostly freebies and betas) and apart from some functions not working as in other, updated hosts (such as proper MIDI control for FX plugins), I think Logic still is the most stable of all the "complexed" sequencers for Windows.

Seriously, it just doesn't crash over here, never, not at all. That's true for a bunch of machines I either own by myself or have configured.
Back in the days it has apparently even be more stable than the adequate Mac version. A shame it has been discontinued, really.

[machinesworking]

Seriously, it just doesn't crash over here, never, not at all. That's true for a bunch of machines I either own by myself or have configured.
Back in the days it has apparently even be more stable than the adequate Mac version. A shame it has been discontinued, really.

Hard to say that, I had mac versions that NEVER went down!
Yeah it's a shame, but Apple and Microsoft are at war, it's just how it is. I almost switched to PC when I switched to Logic, I'm so glad I didn't!

[Hypertone]

To the people with crashes, what are the specs. of your machines? I've always had good luck with my DAWs with XP. I never skimp on components and buy the best I can afford. I always research heavily before buying parts, to make sure it will be compatible with my audiocard and software. The last DAW that I built I probably spent a month deciding on what parts to buy. A DAW is only as good as it's weakest link.


One thing I have noticed is that some people just have bad luck with computers. I could give the PC I'm on right now that has been rock solid for 3 years to certain people that I know today and I guarantee by the end of the next week it would not even boot into Windows.

[BONES]

ok so you DO use a sampler. cool. i cant remmebr the orion drum rack for the life of me. is OP5 stable these days?

Yeah, Rich has put a lot of work into handling things like missing plugins, etc, making it much safer to work with really old songs. Mind you, I have never had any stability problems. I use it live.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[BONES]

Don't you bother with sleep? I noticed you were still going at 5am, you crazy man.